Where I Work

http://www.leadingagile.com/

Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Girl Scout Kanban

I’ve been writing for a few weeks now about my Personal
Kanban Experiment, but actually, it isn’t just MY experiment. My whole family
began using Kanban last December and at the start of the new year my wife and I
spent a day teaching the basics of Kanban to a small group of Girl Scouts.

One of the main things I do for a living is teaching Agile.
I’ve also been teaching people how to manage technology projects using more
traditional methods for about 15 years. While I will (hopefully) never say I am
expert at it, I do believe I have a fairly good handle on the types of things
that make it difficult for people to learn this stuff. I come to each class
hopeful, but also ready for the struggles that sometimes come with helping
people learn a different way of working. That being said, there has been
absolutely nothing I have seen in 15 years of teaching that could have prepared
me for that Saturday in January that my wife and I spent at the local Girl Scout
HQ.

Among her many other accomplishments, my wife is a Girl
Scout Leader and a teacher. She’s never taught Agile before, but she has taught
Project Management and she’s been working on a Kanban experiment of her
own. When my wife first asked me about doing
the class together I was very excited about it. For one, my she is my favorite
person to work with but also, I saw this as a chance to start teaching Agile to
a group of young women who were already training to be leaders in whatever they
go on to do in life. More importantly, this was a chance to teach them Agile
BEFORE they learned waterfall. I was/am giddy at the possibilities this
presents for them when they enter the workforce. My wife was already pretty familiar with all
of the kids who attended our class. I was only familiar with one of them – my
daughter. And, as the day drew closer,
the terror over teaching kids instead of adults took hold. I was worried that
my stories wouldn’t resonate, I knew most of my jokes wouldn’t work and I was pretty
sure that at some point I’d slip up and my language would include phrasing that
was perhaps a bit to colorful, or just plain weird for the room.

Still, with the possible exception of properly loading the
dishwasher, I completely trust my wife and she’s had a lot of experience at
trying to keep me from being an idiot, so my plan was to try and do my best to
adapt the things I normally teach so that they’d make sense for the Girl
Scouts. We started the day by explaining
the basics of Kanban to them. We talked about what a Kanban was, where it came
from, how we wanted to have a board with three columns in it. We talked about
WIP limits and agreed on some basic numbers we would test out. Then we talked
about populating and prioritizing the backlog. AND THAT IS WHERE IT GOT WEIRD!

When I teach CSM classes we spend a good bit of time talking
about and around the Product Backlog before we actually build one. We discuss a
variety of prioritization techniques and the various merits of different ways
of sizing work. Even though it is something
we ease our way into, for many, it is still a struggle. However, take a small group of 12-15 year old Girl Scouts, and tell
them this:

We need a list of all
the stuff we want to get done in this session today. We need to list each thing
on a separate post-it and put it up here in the column we’ve labeled Product
Backlog. Then, we need to figure out which stuff is most important and organize
the stuff in the backlog from most important to least important. We can change our
minds about the order later, but we need to know what to start with now.

After you utter these four sentences, you may have to be
prepared to spend a few minutes brainstorming with them to generate the list.
You may also have to establish working agreements (should we list bathroom
break, or not?). But, within about 5-7 minutes, you’ve got a full backlog that
has been prioritized based on the collective agreement of a group of kids who
have all eagerly, and actively participated in the process.

I thought my head was going to explode.

And then, it got even weirder as the Agile-ish behavior took
hold…

As they began pulling items from the Ready column into the
Doing column, the girls self organized into small groups. (Apparently young
Girl Scouts know how to do this instinctively… there may be a badge.)

Then, as they were working, one of the girls was hungry…
well, ok.. she wasn’t hungry… she was ABSOLUTELY STARVING TO DEATH! She
expressed her need It was acknowledged by the other teams. They examined the
board and realized that the only way to pull Lunch into the doing column was to
complete one of the tasks that was being worked on. That fact established, they
swarmed on the task that was closest to done so that they could move it over
and pull Lunch into doing in order to save the life of their team member. With
respect to swarming, I’m accustomed to seeing adults have a rational adult
discussion about whether or not to swarm, and if so, what to swarm on. I’m
completely not familiar with the insane idea that humans could just look at a
board of Kanbans, identify the item without discussion and swarm on it without
having to talk/debate about it first.

The rest of the day was filled with similar types of
experiences. Because we wanted to give them a way to measure their progress
towards completing the items in their backlog, we taught them to use a burndown
chart… which they updated vigilantly every 30 minutes. Each time a group
finished an item on the board, they ALL walked up to move it over together because
they were part of a team and wanted to celebrate in the accomplishment.

I was at a loss. Where was the frustration, the anger, and the
arguments? The blind panic at the idea that items that need to be addressed
were not going to be the responsibility of one person (who we could hurl under
bus if/when necessary). My wife and I were discussing the freak-ish behavior we
were seeing… wondering when, why and how it is that this open-ness gets removed
from the equation, and more importantly, how we could stop that from ever
happening. It was a truly amazing day.

I often say that I learn more from the students than they
learn from me. Never was this more true than the day my wife and I spent
teaching Girl Scouts about Kanban. Not only did I get a lightbulb upside the
head with the understanding that this open, collaborative way of working was
something that wasn’t born into them, but I came away with the understanding
that, left to their own devices, the Agile-ness is already there. IMHO, what we have to do is find a way to
help kids sharpen their Agile nature it and find a way to protect it from the
waterfall.

My wife and I are now preparing for a longer project to help
provide more agile training and coaching for some of these young ladies as they
begin working towards their Gold Award. (The Gold Award is the highest
achievement a Girl Scout can attain. It is the Girl Scout’s equivalent of the
Boy Scout’s Eagle Scout.) For each of them this will involve managing complex projects
that span several months and involve multiple teams on a variety of
efforts. I the Kanban training is any
kind of indicator, this is going to be an amazing learning experience for all
of us.